The mid block is the hardest thing to coach in football

Defending high or defending deep are both teachable rules, and the middle ground requires judgement that cannot be written down.

Set a team to press from the front and you can give them a trigger. A back pass, a poor first touch, a player receiving with his back turned, and everybody goes. Set them to sit deep and the instruction is even simpler: stay behind the ball, hold the line, do not get dragged out.

Ask them to defend in the middle third and you have just asked twenty-two-year-olds to make continuous judgement calls about when to step and when to hold, with a ten-yard error either way opening the game.

That is why the mid block looks so passive when it is done badly. Nobody wants to be the one who jumps and gets played through, so nobody jumps, and the opposition passes across the front of the shape for twenty minutes while the crowd gets restless and the commentator says the team has no plan. The team has a plan. The plan requires someone to decide, and deciding is the difficult part.

Done well it is the most efficient defending in the game. The distances between lines stay short, the opposition is invited to play into an area that looks open and is not, and when the ball goes in there the recovery is a few yards rather than a sprint back to your own box. You concede the first thirty yards, which are worth almost nothing, and defend the ones that matter with everybody home.

The reason so few sides commit to it is that it is unrewarding to teach and impossible to demonstrate in a highlight package. A high press produces turnovers in dangerous areas and looks like intensity. A low block produces desperate blocks and looks like courage. A mid block produces a slow first half in which nothing happens, which is the intention, and no supporter has ever cheered a well-executed nothing.

I think it is also the reason the mid block gets abandoned first when a manager is under pressure. It has no visible virtue to point at in a bad run.

There is a squad argument too. It requires midfielders who read the game rather than midfielders who run, and those are more expensive per unit of stamina, because judgement does not show up on a running report and cannot be improved by a fitness coach.